Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture. Three main accounts of the adaptive function of storytelling include (a) manipulating the behavior of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator, (b) transmitting survival-relevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first-hand acquisition of that information, and (c) maintaining social bonds or group-level cooperation. We assess the substantial evidence collected in experimental and ethnographic studies for each account. These accounts do not always appeal to the specific features of storytelling above and beyond language use in general. We propose that the specific adaptive value of storytelling lies in making sense of non-routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling the collaborative development of previously acquired skills and knowledge, but also promoting social cohesion by strengthening intragroup identity and clarifying intergroup relations.

A sample of 1015 educational staff members, exhibiting various levels of burnout and depressive symptoms, underwent a memory test involving incident encoding of positive and negative words and a free recall task. Burnout and depression were each found to be associated with increased recall of negative items and decreased recall of positive items. Results remained statistically significant when controlling for history of depressive disorders. Burnout and depression were not related to mistakes in the reported words, or to the overall number of recalled words. This study suggests that burnout and depression overlap in terms of memory biases toward emotional information.

Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture. Three main accounts of the adaptive function of storytelling include (a) manipulating the behavior of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator, (b) transmitting survival-relevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first-hand acquisition of that information, and (c) maintaining social bonds or group-level cooperation. We assess the substantial evidence collected in experimental and ethnographic studies for each account. These accounts do not always appeal to the specific features of storytelling above and beyond language use in general. We propose that the specific adaptive value of storytelling lies in making sense of non-routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling the collaborative development of previously acquired skills and knowledge, but also promoting social cohesion by strengthening intragroup identity and clarifying intergroup relations.

Shared memories play a central role in everyday communications. They are usually based on interpersonal and cultural knowledge of a shared past among group members (e.g. family, friends, partners, etc.). These memories are verbally conveyed in everyday conversations in real-world settings. Shared memories are also utilized to create a feeling of connection and maintain a consistent feeling of identity among group members. In family conversations, shared memories function to structure and synchronize the shareable life story of the family as a group. Family members are strategically engaged in processes of remembering and forgetting, which are modelled according to the specific goals of a particular interaction. In these cases, family members construct a sociocognitive system shaped by the physical and social environment in which they are located. This system operates by connecting autobiographical knowledge, which is distributed among family members, but forms part of shared past experiences. By interrelating distributed episodic memories, this sociocognitive system endows family members with the ability to manage distributed autobiographical knowledge. In order to perform this cognitive task, they make use of a wide set of discursive epistemic strategies such as presuppositions and implicatures, justifications, rejections and reminders of shared knowledge of the past. The aim of this article is to show the ways in which a shared past is managed, communicated and negotiated in an everyday family conversation by means of discursive epistemic strategies. The conversation was about five historical dates linked to Argentinean political history.